Granted, a place in the IUMA archives was hardly a guarantee of success. A musician with the band Black Watch told me that she and her colleagues normally heard only from a fan or so a week. IUMA would _not_ make a band instantly rich. On the other hand, she loved the feedback and encouragement that arrived from all over the world; and, we both thought, wasn’t that important, too—not just the money? The music was finding its way to those who loved it. Besides, in the end, all the small fry might add up. Lord said that instead of one Madonna there might be fifty—“Maybe it will no longer make sense to have even one.”[3.2] Perhaps, I hoped, the money instead would reach the Black Watches. Once Lord had predicted that in several years IUMA might be “a one- or two-digit percentage of the $9 billion music industry.”[3.3] I didn’t know what would happen. Major record companies would surely be doing plenty on their own. And when I talked to Lord in April 1995, IUMA’s annual revenues were still in the low six figures. But that could change, quickly. No matter what happened, IUMA was brilliant for a niched world in which millions were rebelling against the any-color-if-it’s-black mindset. We want just the right friends and spouse; the right home; the right coffee; the right newsgroups, now that they existed for all; and, yes, just the right music. * * * * * The same nichization is happening in the world of publishing—the Internet is home to hundreds if not thousands of electronic publications. So what’s a hometown paper to do? Just how is _Time_ magazine responding? And in such strange times—normal times, actually, once they’ve been around long enough—what becomes of books, especially when you consider the digital piracy issue. In the next chapter I’ll lay out the problems and even suggest a few solutions. CHAPTER FOUR Pulped Wood versus Electrons: Can the Print World Learn to Love the Net? I ran across A. C. Snow on the Internet the other day, and old memories poured forth.[4.1] A.C. is as low tech as they come. He writes a Tar Heelish column with jokes and stories about church picnics and football and beach trips, and yet there he was online with the folksy prose that I remembered from eons ago. The _Raleigh Times_ is gone now. A.C. works instead for the bigger _News & Observer_, a sister newspaper that thudded against my dormitory door when I was in college. Weekday circulation is around 150,000 nowadays, and many state legislators wake up each morning to the _N & O_—it just might be the most powerful paper in North Carolina. Millions of people on the Net, however, would question the need for the three-story tan brick building, the fleet of delivery trucks, and the recent decision to invest $36 million in color presses.